Jun 23, 2006

(Toledo, OH) The news that federal agencies rooted out seven suspected domestic terrorists should have caused me to breathe a sigh of relief. After all, people with plans to create an event "just as good or greater than 9/11" - including the destruction of the Sears Tower in Chicago - must be just the sort of terrorist thugs we want removed from danger, right?

Yet as I sit in my middle class home with my middle class family in the middle-sized city in which we live, I cannot help but wonder if the self-congratulatory words of Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez ring hollow.

Are these legitimate terror threats, or a group of morons with delusions of grandeur? Worse still, perhaps these men have been deliberately enticed by foreign terrorists as easily-spotted decoys, drawing attention away from "real" terrorists.

Then, of course, we have the conspiracy theory, in which a government hell-bent on maintaining a state of fear finds suckers who travel a little too close to the zone of zealous criminality, and entraps them in a fuzzily-constructed "plot" to commit domestic acts of terror.

I was also intrigued with the information that the would-be Miami terrorists sought an advance of $50,000 from the government informant who posed as an al-Qaeda operative. I have a nagging suspicion that these "terrorists" might have been trying to shake down al-Qaeda for some fast cash.

These days I no longer know what to believe.

The Miami case bears considerable similarity to the case of the Toledo terror suspects arrested in February this year. Both cases involve a group of men who allegedly talked the game of terrorism, but whose plans did not seem to have progressed beyond rhetoric.

The government trumpets these cases as terror plots "nipped in the bud," and perhaps they are correct. A part of me - the part that has listened to blithering idiots on the next barstool, or nutty coworkers with crazy schemes - wonders if these groups of arrested men truly represented a threat to our nation, or if they were a group of two-bit nobodies talking smack.

it must be troll night. Advocating bombing Miami? Oh just rolling and laughing here. A ridiculous troll at that.

You know, I don't want to start a fight but I have heard such antagonistic b.s. out of the FAR left toward me, personally as a Christian woman.

But if you take a tally now? The FAR right is an abusive force. (Uh - Ann Coulter ring a bell?) And I'm absolutely sick, on a personal level, that anyone would associate ME with either end of this wildly swinging pendulum. I quit :-)

Several things things that aren't mentioned in either of the above posts, (some of which are covered in the Wikipedia entry for Dwight York/Malachi Z. York):

He had a recording career as "Dr. York", which is mentioned in Wikipedia. What isn't mentioned is that he was quite an underground radio personality in the New York area under the same name, "Dr York", in the late 80's and was a big part of the burgeoning hip-hop community. In fact, Spin Magazine did a layout on him at the time and at least one prominent rapper who went by the name of "Jaz", and his sidekick who went by the name of "Jay-Z" were both members of York's "Ansaarullah" sect. You guys all know who Jay-Z is, right? They were also an influence on many other rappers, as evident by their lyrics, who were not necessarily members. Pete Rock & CL Smooth comes to mind.

These "Ansaarullah" guys were all over the place in Brooklyn and D.C. Their D.C. HQ was located near the intersection of New York Ave and 9th Street, NW and you'd always see them hawking their goods (mostly oils, incense, perfumes and the like) on Georgia Ave., outside of Howard University, and downtown over on F Street (way before that part of downtown, near the Convention Center was "revitalized" -- back when it was still a dump). They'd talk your head off too, about all kinds of interesting shit. As with the Five Percenters, they were required to memorize all sorts of historical and astronomical facts (the distance between the earth and the sun, the circumference of every planet in the solar system, etc.)

Then, they just seemed to disappear from the face of the earth. It took years before I realized that they'd collectively headed south (to Florida and Georgia) and transformed into the Nuwaubians.

Anyways, back to the arrests. I think Nimmo (once again) sums things up nicely here:

ABC News reports: "An FBI informant posed as an emissary from al Qaeda and administered oaths of allegiance to the seven Miami men charged today with providing material support to al Qaeda…. An outline of the indictments to be announced later today indicates the men began meeting with an unnamed FBI informant in November 2005. Justice Department officials say the informant provided boots and a video camera so the men could obtain surveillance pictures of government buildings in Miami."

In other words, this whole affair is a government set-up, engineered to hype the "homegrown" threat of domestic terrorism, that next phase of the neocon effort to trash the Constitution and further militarize society in preparation for World War Four, the generational crusade made in Israel and transplanted in America, the only nation on earth with the required military prowess and a population sufficiently brainwashed and easily frightened by phony terrorists.

I'd cast my vote for "group of morons with delusions of grandeur." But people like that can be dangerous. They didn't stand the proverbial snowball's chance of damaging the Sears Tower but innocent people could have gotten hurt when they blew themselves up while trying to make a bomb.

My question is this---if these were more than just hooligans with threatening talk, then why not wait and closely follow them with hopes of ensnaring true members of Al-Qaeda or at least getting more credible evidence against them?